Aubrey Nemavhedi of the Louis Trichardt branch needs a postbox at the gate to ‘give the mail a home’. Photo supplied.

Put a postbox at your gate, asks Louis Trichardt post office

Date: 08 February 2018 By: Andries van Zyl

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Many residents of Louis Trichardt may find that important mail items go missing, says Dries Rossouw, branch manager at the town’s main Post Office branch. The reason is that townsfolk fail to put up a receptacle for mail at their gates.

As a result, the postman has nowhere safe to leave the mail and is compelled to leave the items stuck in the fence or gate. “Passers-by can take the mail, or a normal breeze could scatter everything in the wind,” said Rossouw.

Dogs are famous for disliking postmen, and fiddling to stick mail into an unsuitable gap in a fence leaves them vulnerable. In 2014, 103 postmen in South Africa were bitten by dogs.

Rossouw said a postbox does not have to be an expensive, specially designed item. With some astute cutting of apertures, an item as commonplace as a two-litre cold-drink bottle can be turned into a suitable, waterproof and windproof postbox.

The postmen of the Louis Trichardt post office deliver close to 7 000 letters per week.

Andries van Zyl

Andries joined the Zoutpansberger and Limpopo Mirror in April 1993 as a darkroom assistant. Within a couple of months he moved over to the production side of the newspaper and eventually doubled as a reporter. In 1995 he left the newspaper group and travelled overseas for a couple of months. In 1996, Andries rejoined the Zoutpansberger as a reporter. In August 2002, he was appointed as News Editor of the Zoutpansberger, a position he holds until today.

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